Editor's note: This blog entry was co-authored by
Avishay Traeger and Ronen Kat, storage researchers at IBM Research - Haifa.

Started two years ago by Rackspace and NASA, the OpenStack Foundation was envisioned as an open and common code base for businesses to build
public and private cloud infrastructure – while sharing common approaches to
management services and APIs.

Ronen Kat

In short, OpenStack is free
open source software for cloud infrastructure and management. It’s growing fast
with more than 150 member companies, worldwide. IBM joined
the foundation in April 2012, seeing the foundation’s platform as an
important way to help clients use the cloud, as well as promote a ubiquitous Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS) cloud platform for public and private clouds.

What about Nova-volume and Cinder, those storage drivers
from Research?

IBM researchers in Haifa, Israel developed drivers
that connect new IBM storage
devices to the cloud – taking advantage of OpenStack
automated provisioning, improved management, and more efficient compression.

The storage in OpenStack cloud
environments can be provisioned using a self-service model that provides
storage on an as-needed basis. Using this model, users only get and pay for
what they really need, and the cloud provider does not have
a situation where cloud storage space is wasted due to over-provisioning.

The Nova-volume and Cinder drivers let those with IBM
storage products from the Storwize and SVC family take
advantage of OpenStack's simplified cloud deployments and automated
storage provisioning.

Connection is just the first step in using the new
OpenStack platform. Our vision goes beyond features
like automated storage tiering with IBM
Easy Tier, Real-time
Compression, and space-efficient storage in our products. The next steps
will include advanced features, such as the enablement of differentiated types
of capabilities through quality of service (QoS).